Movies I Watched in November, Part 2

Continuing the rundown of movies I saw last month....

Despite the title, this movie is actually a love letter to "Star Wars," with the usual carping about the awful prequels and endless tinkering with the original trilogy but much more testimony about how the 1977 movie shaped the lives of the witnesses. (Hell, I was 10 years old in 1977, so I can obviously identify with those folks.) The documentary itself is a snappy affair, quickly cutting from person to person with a nice mix of snarky humor and heartfelt emotion. The fan film section alone might make you reconsider your opinion of Lucas... after all, he never took any sort of legal action against those movies, when he obviously could. (He does hate that "Holiday Special," though.)

And speaking of the 1970s... I was more concerned with "Star Wars" and comic books back in the last days of the decade, but I do remember the Iran Hostage Crisis (as we called it), with images on the news of angry crowds and kids wearing T-shirts with Mickey Mouse flipping the bird and saying "HEY IRAN!" Crazy times, in other words, and Ben Affleck's sure-to-be-nominated drama does a bang-up job of capturing the era in costumes, news footage and facial hair. I realize the movie plays with the actual facts (getting on the plane, for instance, was actually no big deal), but I'm smart enough to know that this is a Big Hollywood Movie and not a documentary or a book, so I'm willing to sacrifice accuracy for entertainment -- and this movie is damned entertaining. That Affleck, he's really something, isn't he? Bet he just looks back on those day with Jennifer Lopez like they were some crazy dream.

In his fascinating book about forgotten movies, "Lost in the Fifties: Recovering Phantom Hollywood," Wheeler Winston Dixon singles out this 1956 movie as an especially notorious Bowery Boys effort -- Leo Gorcey's dad, Bernard, (who played Louie in the series) was killed in a car accident just after the film was completed, and Leo Gorcey himself (who starred as Slip) was visibly drunk and slurring his lines. (With the death of his father, his drinking got much worse.) I  didn't notice that when I watched it on TCM, and I actually thought the gnomelike Bernard Gorcey was pretty damn funny. The strangest thing about the movie to me was that, at the end, the three villains actually DIE in a car crash caused by our heroes, and no one seems the least bit upset. (By the way, this single entry is going to be a mere amuse bouche compared to the Bowery Boys avalanche I unleash once I start reviewing this DVD set .) Bet you can hardly wait.

So-so HBO movie about the Alfred Hitchcock torturing Tippi Hedren during the making of "The Birds" and "Marnie." Toby Jones makes for a pretty good (though pint-sized) Hitch, and Sienna Miller is OK as poor Tip, but the whole thing has a small-scale TV movie feel about it. I'm guessing it's loads better than that "Hitchcock" movie currently in theaters, which to me looks pretty terrible -- and I'm a huge fan of "Psycho." Every time I see those fawning quotes from America's Worst Movie Critic, Peter Travers, I want to throw my copy of "Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of 'Psycho'" at the TV screen.


Finally caught this Alexander Payne drama about a year after it hit theaters. Solid stuff, with Clooney once again proving how damned charismatic he can be on the big screen, this time around playing a guy who discovers his comatose wife had been cheating on him. It's a fairly small, intimate movie, but the Hawaiian location adds an intriguing element of both exoticism and scope. The scenery is genuinely breathtaking, but Payne refreshingly includes the other, less glamorous side of Hawaii, where the people who live their spend their less glamorous lives.

                     

You might remember Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda teaming up for the 1941 Preston Sturges classic "The Lady Eve." Odds are, you don't remember them teaming up for this movie, "The Mad Miss Manton," which arrived three years earlier. It's no classic, but it is a lot of fun, with Stanwyck, playing a spunky socialite who stumbles onto (what else?) murder and Fonda as an intrepid editor who accuses her of being a flaky prankster before they stumble into (what else?) love. Likable leads, a swell 1930s ambience and some good gags. What more do you want?

Here's a genuine pre-Code oddity spotted (where else?) on TCM: It's a murder mystery set almost entirely inside an aquarium (circa 1932, where the tanks and enclosures are painfully cramped) that co-stars Robert Armstrong (a year before "King Kong"), Mae Clarke (a year after "The Public Enemy" and "Frankenstein"), Donald Cook (a year after "The Public Enemy"), Edgar Kennedy (a year before "Duck Soup" -- and with a shaved head!) and Clarence Wilson (who I'll always remember squaring off against Spanky as Mr. Crutch in the Our Gang short "Shrimps for a Day"). The leads are James Gleason (a million movies, including "Meet John Doe" and "Night of the Hunter") and Edna Mae Oliver (lots of movies you've never seen) as a detective and teacher trying to solve the crime. Not exactly fast-paced, but it's quirky enough to make spending 70 minutes with it well worth your time.

I finished off the month with an uplifting double feature of two movies written by Robert Siegel. First up? "The Wrestler," which in retrospect I think we can all agree was just about the best movie of 2008, with only "The Dark Knight" and "Man on Wire" offering any serious competition. Mickey Rourke is stellar, of course, and so is his co-star, Marisa Tomei, who also plays an aging person who makes a living with their body. Bringing it all to stark life is Darron Aronofsky, who gives just right right amount of grungy realism to his direction. (Watch how often the camera follows Rourke further down his spiral.) Spoiler alert: My friend Bob and I had a mini-debate while watching this, arguing whether or not Randy "The Ram" died in the last moments of the movie. I say yes, of course he did, and what's more, I don't even call that a sad ending. From everything we'd seen about The Rammer in the past 109 minutes, it's the only way he would want to leave this world.

That was immediately followed by 2009's "Big Fan," also written (and this time directed) by Siegel and, if anything an even bleaker portrait of a sad life. (After all, The Rammer  did have moments of fame and glory.) Patton Oswald is excellent as Paul, a New York Giants fan so devoted that he scripts out his comments to sports radio before he calls the show. When poor Paul encounters his favorite player -- and the encounter goes horribly, horribly wrong -- we learn how horrifyingly devoted he is. Like "The Wrestler," it's a movie where dozens of tiny details build to form a fully rounded portrait of a 21st century male. Can't wait to see what Siegel does next.